by Philip Roth
If only things had been different, everything would be otherwise.
His fingers still sticky with the sweet jam, Sabbath ended up back in Deborah’s room sifting through the drawers of her desk. Even Silvija had them. They all had them. Just a matter of finding where they stash them away. Not even Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah have been able to stamp out the fun you can have with a Polaroid. Gloria Steinem herself can’t do it. In the contest between Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, and Gloria on the one side and on the other the innermost itch that gives life its tingle, I’ll give you the three boys and Gloria and eighteen points.
Now where have you hidden them, Deborah? Am I hot or am I cold? The desk was a big oak antique with polished brass handles, originating probably in the office of some nineteenth-century lawyer. Unusual. Most kids like the plastic crap. Or is this what’s called camp? He began removing the contents of the long top drawer. Two large leatherbound scrapbooks with dried leaves and flowers pressed between each pair of pages. Botanically beguiling, delicately done . . . but you ain’t foolin’ anyone. Scissors. Paper clips. Glue. Ruler. Smallish address books with floraldesign covers and no addresses as yet entered in. Two gray boxes about five by six inches. Eureka! But within, only her personalized stationery, mauve like the lavender sachet. In one box, some handwritten sheets folded in two that looked promising momentarily but were only the drafts of a poem on love unrequited. “I opened my arms but no one saw . . . I opened my mouth and no one heard. . . .” You have not been reading your Ava Gardner, dear. Next drawer, please. Dalton yearbooks from 1989 to 1992. More teddy bears. Six here plus eight in the wicker basket. Camouflage. Clever. Next. Diaries! The jackpot! A stack of them, bound in cardboard with colorful flowery designs very like those on the underpants in his pocket. He took them out to quimper. Yep, matching underpants, diaries, and address books. The kid’s got everything. Except. Except! Where are the pictures hidden, Debby? “Dear Di, I find myself becoming more and more drawn to him, trying to work out my feelings. Why, why are relationships so hard?” Why not write about fucking him? Hasn’t anybody at Brown taught you what writing is for? Page after page of crap quite unworthy of her until he came upon an entry beginning as the others did—“Dear Di”—but divided by a ruled pen stroke into two columns, one labeled MY STRENGTHS and the other MY WEAKNESSES. Something here? He’d take anything by now.
MY STRENGTHS
MY WEAKNESSES
Self-discipline
Low self-esteem
My backhand
My serve
Hopefulness
Infatuations
Amy
Mother
Sarah L.
Low self-esteem
Robert (?)
Robert!!!!
Nonsmoker
Too emotional
Nondrinker
Impatience with Mom
Thoughtlessness with Mom
My legs
Butting in
Not always listening
Eating
Whew, this is work. A thin three-ring notebook with a college decal on the front and beneath it a white label on which was typed “Yeats, Eliot, Pound. Tues. Thurs. 10:30. Solomon 002. Prof. Kransdorf.” In the notebook were her class notes, along with photocopies of poems that Kransdorf must have distributed to the class. The very first was by Yeats. Called “Meru.” Sabbath slowly read it . . . the first poem he’d read by Yeats—and one of the last he’d read by anyone—since leading the life of a seaman.
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day brings round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.
Debby’s notes were written on the sheet, directly below the poem’s date of composition.
Meru. Mountain in Tibet. In 1934, WBY (Irish poet) wrote introduction to Hindu friend’s translation of a holy man’s ascent into renouncing the world.
K: “Yeats was at the verge beyond which all art is vain.”
The theme of the poem is that man is never satisfied unless he destroys all that he has created, e.g. the civilizations of Egypt and Rome.
K: “The poem’s emphasis is on man’s obligation to strip away all illusion in spite of the terror of nothingness with which he will be left.”
Yeats comments in a letter to a friend: “We free ourselves from obsession that we may be nothing. The last kiss is given to the void.”
man=human
Class criticized poem for its lack of a woman’s perspective. Note unconscious gender privileging—his terror, his glory, his (phallic) monuments.
He ransacked the remaining drawers. Letters to Deborah Cowan dating back to grade school. Perfect place to hide Polaroids. Patiently he went through the envelopes. Nothing. A handful of acorns. Postcards, blank on one side, reproductions on the other. The Prado, the National Gallery, the Uffizi . . . Box of staples, which he opened, curious to see if this nineteen-year-old girl who pretended to love flowers and teddy bears best of all might be using the staple box to secrete half a dozen joints. But only staples were secreted in the staple box. What’s wrong with this kid?
Bottom drawer. Two ornamentally carved wooden boxes. Nope. Nothing. Doodads. Tiny beaded bracelets and necklaces. Braided hairpieces. Headbands. A hair clip with a black velvet bow. Smelling of nobody’s hair. Smelling of lavender. This child is perverted, but the wrong way.
The closets packed. Pleated skirts with floral prints. Loose silk pants. Black velvet jackets. Jogging suits. Tons of paisley kerchiefs on the overhead shelf. Big baggy things that looked like maternity dresses. Short linen dresses. (With her legs?) Size 10. What size was Drenka? He could no longer remember! Loads of pants. Corduroy. Blue jeans galore. Now why does she leave at home all her underwear and all her clothes, jeans included, when she goes to school? Does she have even more stuff there—are they that ostentatiously rich?—or is this what privileged girls do, leave it all behind rather the way certain animals, to mark their terrain, leave behind them a trail of pee?
He went through the pockets of all the jackets and all the pants. He searched among the heaps of kerchiefs. By now he was getting good and angry. Where the fuck are they, Deborah?
The drawers. Calm down. There are still three drawers to go. Since he’d been in the top, the underwear drawer, more than once already, and since he was beginning to feel the pressure of time—his plan was to get downtown before the funeral to visit the site of his first and only theater—he skipped to the second drawer. It was hard to pull the drawer open, so stuffed was it with T-shirts, sweatshirts, baseball caps, and socks of every variety, some with slots of different colors for each of the toes. How cute. He plunged right through to the bottom. Nothing. He worked his hands in among the T-shirts. Nothing. He pulled open the drawer below. Bathing suits, all kinds, a delight to touch, but he’d have to examine them more exhaustively later. Also cotton flannel pajamas with nice things like hearts printed all over them, and nightgowns with ruffled hems and lace trim. Pink and white. Back to them, too. Time, time, time . . . and there were not only T-shirts on the carpet by the dresser but skirts and pants on the floor in the closet, kerchiefs all the way over on the bed, the desk a mess, drawers all open and her diaries scattered across the top. Everything to be put back with fingers that were now killing him.
The bottom drawer. Last chance. Camping equipment. Vuarnet sunglasses, three pairs without cases.
She had three, six, ten of everything. Except! Except! And there it was.
There it was. The gold. His gold. At the bottom of the bottom drawer, where he should have begun in the first place, in among a jumble of old schoolbooks and more teddy bears, a simple Scotties box, design of white, lilac, and pale green flowers on a lemony-white background. “Each box of Scotties offers the softness and strength you want for your family. . . .” You’re no fool, D. Handwritten label on the box read, “Recipes.” You cunning girl. I love you. Recipes. I’ll give you teddy bears up the gazoo!
Inside the Scotties box were her recipes—“Deborah’s Sponge Cake,” “Deborah’s Brownies,” “Deborah’s Chocolate Chip Cookies,” “Deborah’s Divine Lemon Cake”—neatly written in blue ink in her hand. A fountain pen. The last kid in America to write with a fountain pen. You won’t last five minutes in Bahia.
A short, very stout woman was standing in the doorway of Deborah’s bedroom screaming. Only her mouth was she able to move; the rest of her appeared to be paralyzed with the terror. She was wearing tan stretch pants stretched to their limit and a gray sweatshirt bearing the name and logo of Deborah’s university. In a large, broad face excavated by irregular patches of pockmarks, only her lips were prominent, elongated and sharply etched, the lips of the indigenous, as Sabbath knew, south of the border down Mexico way. The eyes were the eyes of Yvonne de Carlo. Nearly everybody has at least one good feature, and in mammals it’s usually the eyes. His own were thought by Nikki to be his arresting feature. She made much of them back when he weighed seventy pounds less. Green like Merlin’s, Nikki said back when it was all still play, when she was Nikita and he was agápe mou, Mihalákimou, Mihalió.
“Don’t shoot. No shoot me. Four childs. One here.” She pointed to her belly, a belly as pierceable as a small balloon. “No shoot. Money. I find money. No money here. I show money. No shoot me, Mister. Cleaning woman.”
“I don’t want to shoot you,” said he, from where he was seated on the carpet, the recipes in his lap. “Don’t scream. Don’t cry. It’s okay.”
Gesturing jerkily, hysterically—toward him, toward herself—she told him, “I show money. You take. I stay. You go. No police. All money you.” She motioned now for him to follow her out of Deborah’s defiled room and down the book-lined corridor. In the master bedroom, the big bed was as yet unmade, books and nightclothes flung to either side of it, books strewn about the bed like alphabet blocks in a baby’s playroom. He stopped to examine the book jackets. How does the educated rich Jew put himself to sleep these days? Still Eldridge Cleaver? John Kennedy: Profile of Power. Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First One Hundred Years. The Warburgs. . .
Why don’t I live like this? The bedsheets weren’t worn and antiseptic white like those that he and Roseanna slept at either edge of but glowed warmly, a pale golden pattern that reminded him of the radiant glory of the October day up at the Grotto when Drenka had run roughshod over her own record and come thirteen times. “More,” she begged, “more,” but in the end he fell back with a terrible headache and told her he couldn’t continue risking his life. He seated himself heavily on his haunches, pale, perspiring, breathless, while on her own Drenka took over the quest. This was like nothing he had ever seen before. He thought, It’s as though she is wrestling with Destiny, or God, or Death; it’s as though, if only she can break through to yet one more, nothing and no one will stop her again. She looked to be in some transitional state between woman and goddess—he had the queer feeling of watching someone leaving this world. She was about to ascend, to ascend and ascend, trembling eternally in the ultimate, delirious thrill, but instead something stopped her and a year later she died.
Why does one woman love you madly when she swallows it and another hate your guts if you suggest she even try it? Why is the woman who swallows it with rapacity the dead mistress, while the one who holds you to the side, so you squirt your heart out into the air, is the living wife? Is this luck only mine, or is it everyone’s? Was it Kennedy’s? The Warburgs’? The Delany sisters’? In my forty-seven-year experiment with women, which I hereby declare officially concluded . . . And yet the colossal balloon that was Rosa’s behind piqued his curiosity no less than the pregnant belly did. When she bent to open one of the master bedroom’s bureau drawers he remembered back to his initiation in Havana, the classic old brothel where you go into a salon and the girls are marched in for the clients. The young women came in from wherever they were lounging around, wearing nothing resembling those baggy garments in Deborah’s closet but all in skintight dresses. What was amazing was that while he chose Yvonne de Carlo, his friend Ron—he’d never forgotten this—chose a pregnant one. Sabbath couldn’t figure out why. Then when he grew more knowledgeable, the opportunity, strangely enough, had never come his way.
Till now.
She thinks I’ve got a gun. Let’s see where this leads us. Last time he had anything like as much fun was watching Matthew split Barrett’s skull open instead of his own.
“Here,” she pleaded. “Take. Go. No shoot me. Husband. Four childs.”
She had opened a drawer stacked about a foot high with lingerie, not the hot stuff that the kid had ordered from some mail-order catalog but smooth, lustrous, and perfectly piled. Collector’s items. And Sabbath was a collector, had been all his life. I can’t tell a pansy from a marigold, but underwear? If I can’t identify it, nobody can.
Rosa gingerly lifted from the drawer a generous helping of nightgowns and laid them lightly at the foot of the bed. The nightgowns had been hiding two nine-by-twelve manila envelopes. She handed him one and he opened it. One hundred hundred-dollar bills, paper-clipped together in wads of ten each.
“Whose is this? This money belongs to—?” He was pointing to the bed, to one side, then the other.
“La señora. Secret money.” Rosa was looking down at her belly, her hands—chubby and astonishingly tiny—crossed there like the hands of a child being rebuked.
“Always this much? Siempre diez mil?” Virtually all his whorehouse Spanish was gone, yet he could still remember the numbers, the prices, the levy imposed, the fact that you could go out and buy it like a papaya or pomegranate or a watch or a book, like anything that you wanted enough to part with your hard-earned dough to get it. “Cuánto? Cuántos pesos?” “Para qué cosa?” Et cetera.
Rosa made the gesture to indicate sometimes more, sometimes less. If he could just calm her down long enough to break through to the base instincts . . .
“Where does she get the money?” he asked.
“No comprendo.”
“Is this money she earns at work? In italiano, lavoro.”
“No comprendo.”
Trabajo! God, it was coming back. Trabajo. How he’d loved his trabajo. Painting, chipping, painting, chipping, and then fucking himself silly on shore. It was just as natural as getting off the ship and going into a bar and having a drink. In no way was it extraordinary. But to me and Ron it was the most extraordinary thing in the world. You got off the ship and you headed straight for the one thing you had never done before. And never would want to stop doing again.
“How does Missus make her living? Qué trabajo?”
“Odontología. Ella es una dentista.”
“A dentist? La señora?” He tapped a front tooth with his fingernail.
“Sí.”
Men in and out of the office all day long. Gives ’em gas. That nitrous oxide. “The other envelope,” he said. “El otro, el otro, por favor.”
“No money,” she replied flatly. There was opposition in her now. Suddenly she looked a little like General Noriega. “No money. En el otro sobre no hay nada.”
“Nothing at all? An empty envelope hidden under fifteen nightgowns at the bottom of her bottom drawer? Gimme a break, Rosa.”
The woman was astonished when he concluded with “Rosa,” but she appeared not to know whether to be more frightened of him or less. Spoken inadvertently enough, her name turned out to be just the thing
to resuscitate her uncertainty as to what kind of madman she was dealing with.
“Absolutamente nada,” she said bravely. “Está vacío, señor! Umpty!” Here she gave way and began to cry.
“I’m not going to shoot you. I told you that. You know that. What are you afraid of? No peligro.” What the whores used to tell him when he inquired about their health.
“Is umpty!” declared Rosa, sobbing like a child into the crook of her arm. “Es verdad!”
He didn’t know whether to follow his inclination and put a hand out to comfort her or to appear more ruthless by reaching for the pocket where she thought the pistol was. The main thing was to keep her from screaming again and running for help. His remaining so calm while in a state of tremendous excitement he could not account for—he might not look it, he might never have looked it, but he was really a high-strung fellow. Delicate feelings. To be callous quite like this was not in his nature (except with a perpetual drunk). Sabbath did not care to make people suffer beyond the point that he wanted them to suffer; he certainly didn’t want to make them suffer any more than made him happy. Nor was he ever dishonest more than was pleasant. In this regard, at least, he was much like others.
Or was Rosa having him on? He’d bet Rosa was a lot less high-strung than he was. Four childs. Cleaning woman. No English. Never enough money. On her knees, crossing herself, praying—all an act to prove what? Why drag in Jesus, who has his own troubles? A nail through either palm you sympathize with when you suffer osteoarthritis in both hands. He had roared with laughter recently (first time since Drenka’s death) when Gus told him over the gas pump that his brother-in-law and sister had been in Japan at Christmas, and when they went to shop at the biggest department store in some big city there, first thing they saw up above the entrance was a gigantic Santa Claus hanging from a cross. “Japs don’t get it,” Gus said. Why should they? Who does? But in Madamaska Falls Sabbath kept his retort to himself. He had got into difficulty enough explaining to one of Roseanna’s fellow teachers that he could take no interest in her specialty, Native American literature, because Native Americans ate treyf. She had to consult a Jewish American friend to find out what that meant, but when she did she let him have it. He hated them all, except Gus.
